CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2018-8120 — Microsoft Win32k Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists in Windows when the Win32k component fails to properly handle objects in memory, aka "Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability." This affects Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2. This CVE ID is unique from CVE-2018-8124, CVE-2018-8164, CVE-2018-8166.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.2 (2.0)
- Published
- 2018-05-09
- CISA KEV
- Known exploited
- Ecosystem
- windows/system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-404
Affected products
- microsoft / windows_7
- microsoft / windows_server_2008
- microsoft / windows_server_2008 / r2
Showing 3 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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